Here’s a collection of things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest:<\/p>\n
The Tevatron is doing quite well, with sizable increases in luminosity in recent months. There are some articles telling about this in Fermilab Today<\/a>, and you can get up to date information about how things are going here<\/a>. At the moment they’re doing better than their “design” projection, which is meant to be quite optimistic.<\/p>\n On December 1 there will be a live 12 hour webcast called Beyond Einstein<\/a>, which will feature many different groups and individuals talking about physics.<\/p>\n December 1 will also be the opening of the 23rd Solvay conference in Brussels. These conferences have a very illustrious history<\/a>. This year the topic is The Quantum Structure of Space and Time<\/a>, and most of the invited participants<\/a> will be string theorists. Of the 60 participants there seems to be exactly one physicist from the LQG camp, Abhay Ashtekar. There will also be an event for the public<\/a>, with talks by string theorists Brian Greene and Robbert Dijkgraaf, and a debate featuring five string theorists and Gerard ‘t Hooft.<\/p>\n Witten has been giving talks about his new work on gauge theory and geometric Langlands. Notes from a talk at Penn last month are on-line<\/a>, and video from a talk at Rutgers<\/a> last week should soon appear.<\/p>\n A conference was held earlier this month at Queen Mary College in London entitled From Twistors to Amplitudes<\/a>, with many interesting talks on using twistor techniques to study gauge theory amplitudes.<\/p>\n There’s a new site called Mixed States<\/a> which does a good job of aggregating blog entries about physics.<\/p>\n There are all sorts of links relevant to research in number theory at the Number Theory Web<\/a>.<\/p>\n Robert Wald has an article on teaching general relativity<\/a>. Until I taught our graduate differential geometry course I hadn’t realized just how tricky the definition of a tangent vector can be. Most of the difficulty with teaching GR has to do with the large amount of sophisticated geometry needed. <\/p>\n This<\/a> is one of the funnier things I’ve read in a while. It seems that, like all non-string theorists, internet con artists are really stupid.<\/p>\n Update:<\/b> Two recent talks by Alain Connes at the KITP in Santa Barbara are now online. One is entitled Non-Commutative Geometry and Space-Time<\/a>, the other, discussing his ideas about the Riemann hypothesis, is called Noncommutative Motives, Thermodynamics, and the Spectral Realization of Zeros of Zeta<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s a collection of things I’ve run across recently that may be of interest: The Tevatron is doing quite well, with sizable increases in luminosity in recent months. There are some articles telling about this in Fermilab Today, and you … Continue reading